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Welcome to this resource for psychologists Started on 21st January 2006 we have had almost four million visitors in 2010. We have over 90k visitors per week in term time and currently have 78,607 pages and 34,189 articles. See the To Do page to help.

How to use the site

You can access articles by following the links above in the Foundations and Applied psychology sections. From here, you are no more than six clicks away from any article. This is a good way to explore the site.

You can use the extensive search capabilities of the site by entering a term into the search box in the left side bar.

About the Psychology Wiki

Rationale

The rationale for this site follows from our judgement that whatever the considerable merits of Wikipedia, it could never gain the full support of the academic and professional members of the discipline of psychology as an approved information source.

Yet the technology holds out great promise for centrally consolidating information in the science, providing a conduit for authorative information for academic and applied training, and continuing professional development, as well as providing a vehicle for informing the general public about our discipline.

By developing a specialist site for psychology we hope to win the support of the national psychology societies, and through them to develop a mechanism of appropriate peer review of all articles and to restrict contributors to those with professional qualifications. This will allow articles to achieve academic status for referencing purpose and eventually ground the content solidly in the knowledge base of the discipline.

Aim

We aim to provide an up-to-date, authoritative statement of knowledge, theory, and practice in the whole field of psychology. The site is written to serve both staff and students of our academic community, to inform professionals, both in training and in the field, and to provide information for the people we seek to help.

By using the latest collaborative editing software we have built a new kind of knowledge structure for our science that can be shaped and maintained, to the highest academic standards, by our profession as a whole.

We aim for factual accuracy and all articles should be properly referenced. We also aim to be a forum for ideas, so on each discussion page we encourage alternative opinion, proposals for hypotheses requiring verification, practitioner reports, user views, etc.

The Psychology Wiki founders, administrators, and editors make no money from this site. It is an entirely voluntary operation, disseminating copyright-free psychology information. Our goal is to share, without costs of any kind, psychology knowledge between academic and professional psychologists and with a wider audience of non-psychologists.

The Google advertisements in the right hand pane on your screen are part of the business funding model of Wikia Inc.. As a new form of publisher, they host the wiki (and hundreds of others), providing the technical facilities, bandwidth, storage, backup, and technical support for free. Their declared intention is to do this in perpetuity, the company making its profit via the advertisements. Wikia was set up jointly by the founder of Wikipedia and a long-time WikiMedia board member, as another approach to making knowlege available, without cost to contributors or readers.

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Peer review

Now that we have finished the first draft of the site and established a solid underlying structure consistent with the APA Thesaurus we are now proceeding to the next stage and establishing a peer review system for the site.

ABSTRACT: The author proposes a dialectical/realist solution to the problem of multiple paradigms in psychology. Specifically, he argues that theoretical models in psychology are akin to various two-dimensional maps of the three-dimensional, spherical earth. In cartography each projection serves as a complementary, if ultimately inadequate, perspective on the whole, in a context where a “total perspective” is impracticable. Like such cartographic projections, each paradigm in psychology (biological, behavioral, cognitive, systems, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, etc.) necessarily distorts certain aspects of human mind and behavior while being accurate regarding others which are, in turn, distorted by other points of view. The author argues that the various paradigms in psychology emerge as a result of (combinations of) answers to fundamental problems in the philosophy of psychology. These are the problems of: (1) free will vs. determinism, (2) materialism vs. phenomenology, (3) reductionism vs. emergent properties, (4) public vs. private criteria for psychological propositions, (5) the individual vs. the system as the basic unit of inquiry and description, (6) facts vs. interpretations (hermeneutics) as the datum of psychology, and (7) knowledge vs. unknowability as a basic methodological assumption. Psychologists have been mistaken in their assumption that the oppositions or “antinomies” represented in these problems must lead to mutually exclusive ideas. Instead, the polarities (e.g. free will and determinism) are better conceived dialectically as complementary, interdependent ideas; each idea only making sense by assuming the truth of its presumed contrary. When the complementarity of these contraries is recognized the problem of multiple paradigms and factionalization in psychology is cast in a new light. Psychologists can continue to flesh out details in their various maps, secure that they are contributing to the exploration of a (dialectically) integrated whole. Full text

Disclaimer

Please Note:

Psychology and medicine are changing sciences and not all therapies are clearly established. New research changes treatment and therapy recommendations daily. The contributors to the Psychology Wiki have used their best efforts to provide information that is up-to-date and accurate and reflects generally accepted academic standards at the time of publication. However, as our science is constantly changing and human error possible, the contributors to this article do not warrant the information as accurate or complete, nor are they responsible for omissions or errors in the article or for the results of using this information. The reader should confirm the information in this article from other sources prior to use. See full disclaimer for further statement.